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The 5 hot social media tools and platforms this week

PR Daily contributor Adam Vincenzini rounds up five of the most-talked-about social media platforms each week. The feature is called Platform Five, and it appears on the Paratus Communications blog. Adam has agreed to simulcast it on PR Daily.

This week, we’re looking at a service that might make the online world a little safer, and a Twitter app that might spell the end for manual scheduling as we know it. We’ve also got a tool that makes resizing images a breeze.

1. tru.ly useful. Have you ever wanted a single, verified identity on the Internet? tru.ly might make this a reality by verifying your social network identity, giving you your own QR code and a personal URL. It also allows you to verify the identities of other people, making offline interactions safer (theoretically). For the time, it appears the service is only available to residents of the U.S.. Check out the FAQs for more information.

2. Quench your wonderlust with Wanderfly.com. This is ace! Wanderfly helps you discover new places to travel in the simplest way possible. All you need to do is follow the basic prompts on the landing page and your inspiration is delivered. Flight availability and prices are on hand, too. You’ll probably see some copycat versions of this in the very near future. More at ReadWriteWeb.com.

3. Get your buffer on with Bufferapp.com. Scheduling updates on Twitter is usually a manual and laborious process. However, you can potentially say goodbye to scheduling thanks to Bufferapp.com. This nifty Chrome Extension allows you to pull links you want to share directly into your Bufferapp queue, and it takes care of the rest, tweeting your updates in a consistent and timely manner. Check out the demonstration video for more.

4. Imagine the perfect imaging tool.Bigimg.it should be automatically tagged with a “useful” sticker. This site allows you to take a big image you’ve found online and re-size it, making it more manageable and easier to use. Bloggers will love this tool.

5. Where My Friends Be? Here, kind of. Mashable is notorious for making and breaking websites with one blog post. It did it again this week when it lifted the lid on an app that visualizes your Facebook friends on Google Maps. The post generated so much interest that the site fell over and hasn’t been back up since! Worth a look when the site’s back to normal.

If you’ve spotted a tool that you think deserves a place on Platform Five, please send us an e-mail. And, don’t forget, you can keep up with the team at Paratus via Twitter or on Facebook.